Scheduling Hell
Nothing makes library employees more miserable than haphazard work days.
I have worked some ugly shifts in my career:
Airport Ramp Rat: 3:30 am to 1:30 pm. Going to bed at 8:00 pm never seemed to work.
Grocery Store clerk in college: 7:00 am to 12:00 pm on Saturday and 8:00 am to 6:00 pm on Sundays, tough to get up when I was usually hugely hungover.
Retail store #1: Close the place at 8:00 pm, back in the next morning to open in at 8:00 am. “Clo-Ope” it was called.
Retail store #2: 8:00 am to 11:00 am; 2:00 pm to 5:00 pm. The place was an hour’s drive from my house, one way. I usually just ate my miserable PB&J sandwich in my car and took a nap in the park until it was time to clock back in.
City of San Diego: Graveyard shift from 9:00 pm to 7:00 am. I lived 30 miles east of the city, so every morning was the same Evil Rising Sun burning my eyeballs blind as I drove home. Four months later, it was 2:00 pm to 12:00 am, then four months after that it was 6:00 am to 4:00 pm, then back to graveyards.
When I worked for the City, I had three days off in a row, which made most of those shifts tolerable. (Many studies on the harm of circadian changes with employees working continued shifts during graveyards hours suggest it can actually shorten your life.)
I often worked weekends and had midweek days off, which made going to the movies and the grocery store less crowded. Working both weekend days if you have a family feels like you’re missing out on the other parts of your life. Everyone is out having fun but you, without you. This seems especially true when the weather is sunny and beautiful on the weekend when you’re stuck inside and dreary and gray when you’re home.
I get that we must schedule employees to meet the needs of the library’s operations and opening/closing times. This is especially true if your library is open 10 hours per day, six days a week and eight hours on Sundays. Having to fill nearly 70 hours per week is complex. Juggling days off, vacations, employees out on leave, training days, or calling in sick, can make even the smoothest scheduling software consider crashing itself out of frustration.
When it comes to scheduling hourly-rate library employees for their shifts, other than a split-shift work day, which I hope never has to happen to you, I would say the most miserable week is one where you don’t have two consecutive days off in a row. It seems most likely that we do this to part-time employees: Mon-Wed-Fri-Sun or Tue-Thu-Sat-Mon, for five hours per shift. No “weekend” for you!
I’ll agree with “Rank Hath Its Privileges” when it comes to employee seniority around schedules (often a union MOU agreement anyway), but it can be hard to be “low employee on the scheduling totem pole” and work different shifts and/or at different branches, especially when no change is in sight, for months or even years. Consider breaking that pattern, bosses, to improve overall morale. (One mad employee may be better than seven mad employees)
If you’re the boss in charge of scheduling, remind your employees to notify you well in advance of the days off they need. It’s tough to sit and listen to a shaggy dog story about how the employee’s second cousin died (third time this year) and they need “time off” for the “funeral,” (also known as the spontaneous three-day weekend Vegas trip).
Try to rotate the work schedules on a fair but good-for-the-business basis. It can help to give some library employees experience with working different shifts (opening instead of closing and vice versa), on different days, and even different branches, to expose them to a whole new set of patrons with different needs.
If you’re an employee, make it easy for your boss to meet your scheduling needs with: advanced notice; cooperation without whining; and even shift swaps with same-level employees, to make it easy to accommodate you.